AI Insight
ECOGAL is a large-scale ALMA data mining project that reprocesses archival radio telescope observations aligned with optical and infrared surveys from Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. The first catalogue covers approximately 130,000 galaxies across three major survey fields (COSMOS, GOODS-S, and UDS), identifying 622 unique sources with millimeter-wave detections at redshifts ranging from 0.12 to 6.85. The project produces both prior-based catalogues matched to existing optical detections and blind catalogues of significant ALMA detections, with publicly available datasets for community use.
Why it matters
This work maximizes the scientific value of existing telescope archives by systematically combining over a decade of ALMA observations with modern optical and infrared data. The unified catalogue enables research on dust-obscured star formation, galaxy evolution across cosmic time, and optically invisible galaxies that would otherwise remain undetected in traditional surveys.
Understand the Science
⚠️ Preprint – Noch nicht peer-reviewed
Dieser Artikel wurde noch nicht von unabhängigen Experten begutachtet. Die Ergebnisse sind vorläufig und sollten mit Vorsicht interpretiert werden.
Abstract: We present ECOlogy for Galaxies using ALMA archive and Legacy surveys (ECOGAL), an ALMA data mining project. Using the footprints of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), we query and uniformly reprocess ALMA data to produce continuum images and two complementary source catalogues: (i) a prior-based catalogue anchored to optical/near-infrared detections, and (ii) a blind catalogue based on significant ALMA detections. Detection thresholds are established through peak signal-to-noise-ratio statistics and analysis of inverted maps. In this paper, we focus on the ALMA-accessible CANDELS fields (COSMOS, GOODS-S, and UDS), covering $sim$130,000 optical/NIR-selected galaxies spanning $0.0<z<15.0$. We identify 1288 detections (622 unique) with optical/NIR counterparts across the two methods, of which 832 detections (395 unique) appear in both. Among the 622 unique sources, 307 have spectroscopic redshifts from $0.12<z<6.85$. ECOGAL expands the parameter space previously explored by A3COSMOS and A3GOODS-S by incorporating the UDS field and integrating publicly available JWST datasets from the DAWN JWST Archive (DJA). We also highlight several science cases enabled by ECOGAL, including studies of gas fractions inferred from dust continuum emission in galaxies across different environments, the obscured fraction of star formation, and optically dark systems. ECOGAL provides science-ready datasets for the community and showcases the power of combining over a decade of accumulated public data with other legacy datasets. The data product is made publicly available and accompanies a post demonstrating the usage of the catalogue on the DJA webpage.